Personal Development, Where to Begin

My Self-Development Journey

Welcome to the first episode of Godspeed Personal Development, a podcast by me, James Travis to take learning and self-development that should be taught in school and apply it where it is most useful: in everyday life. In this episode, Today, I’m going to talk about my self-development journey along with the 3 steps to learn self-mastery: the first step to self-development.

3-Step of Self-Mastery Highlights

1. Taking Responsibility of Your Actions

  • You and you alone dictate your behavior because you have the power to choose & are a product of those choices.
  • The truth is there’s not a lot of things you can control in life. Not the weather, not the stock market, not the things others say to you.
  • When we don’t exercise our ability to choose we learn helplessness. We give others power & permission to choose our life for us.
  • Our options to choose may be taken away but our ability to choose can’t. That’s why we must always be aware of our options.

2. Determining Which Results you Want and Which Actions You’ll Take to Get There

  • We should be weighing our options to determine which option gives us the best chance to achieve the goal we want.
  • We should know our destination before we even set out to begin our journey.
  • Take action based on the goals you’d like to achieve.
  • An effective goal focuses on results rather than activities.

3. Seeing What’s Truly Important and not Wasting Time on the Unimportant

  • Learn what’s truly important to you and act only on those things.
  • Personal management = getting things done
  • Personal leadership = getting the right things done
  • The most important things to do are important & not urgent, like eating right & exercising. Over time ignoring the important but not urgent shapes our lives in a dramatic way.

Using S.M.A.R.T Goals

If you didn’t already know my story on how this website got started it began as a college homework assignment. I was challenged to create a SMART goal (attaining it was optional). I chose to learn how to build websites because I thought it was cool that anybody could share their knowledge and engage with the world around them.

I had no idea what I was doing but I had all the tools I needed to get started. I learned how to code from downloading sample websites and reverse engineering them to figure out which code did what. At the end of the week, I felt confident enough in what I learned to build my first ever webpage.

Even after I had met my goal I was still hungry to learn more. I asked everyone I could at the university I went to on how to make my website better. Eventually, someone got tired of me asking all these questions and gave me a position on the student newspaper. I earned a scholarship for getting the student newspaper online as the first ever webmaster. I was shocked that such a small skill I had taught myself over the course of a week helped pay for my college education.

Share this show on Facebook

To help me deliver the best show possible

Leave an honest review on iTunes, I read every one.

Subscribe on iTunes

What’d you think about my 1st ever podcast? Leave a comment below.

Right-click here and choose “save as” to download this episode to your computer